@everyword turns Twitter into poetry, tweets every word in English language

It began with “a.” Then “aah.” Then “aalii.” And on June 7, at last, came the final word.

After seven years and 109,000 tweets, the Internet sensation @everyword published what it claims to be every word in the English language — one tweet per word every 30 minutes.

Since the account started in the fall of 2007, @everyword has accumulated more than 1,000 followers and has succeeded where most spin-off accounts have failed.

The Twitter bot, a program used to produce automated tweets, was built by Adam Parrish, a New York University professor, who got the idea to put up the entire English dictionary on Twitter while attending graduate school at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

“ITP is a fantastic program focused around finding innovative uses for new technology,” Parrish said in an e-mail. “I was studying the work of poets like Jackson Mac Low and Kenneth Goldsmith at the time, whose work is characterized by treating words and language as a kind of ‘raw material’ — creating poems from rules and procedures. Twitter was still a new product at that time, and I thought it would be an interesting experiment to create a ‘satire’ of what I perceived to be the nature of discourse on Twitter at the time—short, contextless, meaningless.”

The account may have begun as a satire but, even to the surprise of Parrish, gained the attention of thousands.

“My guess is that [@everyword’s success] had something to do with the fact that — unlike many other Twitter bots — it had an ending,” he notes. “Works with endings are also kind of [an] adventure, a test of endurance, a source of anticipation — and those are all things that people enjoy.”

As an expression of conceptual poetry, essentially “uncreative” writing, @everyword showcases Twitter’s ability to be used as a medium for artistic expression and social commentary.

The words, removed from any context, appear to take on a form of their own — shaped by the tweets that appear on the individual user’s Twitter feed and the additional connotations people project onto them by retweeting and tweeting back to the account.

“Take a word like ‘sex’ out of context, and it doesn’t actually *mean* anything… but we do recognize it as a standalone symbol that we’ve all collectively imbued with its own power and imagery and symbolism,” Parish says.

“This little bit of language that began its life as a written recording, on paper, of the movement of breath through someone’s mouthparts, has picked up all of this additional ‘stuff,’ and now has a life of its own. @everyword makes you consider, well, *every* word in that way—why did we decide to take *this* chunk of language and give it the status of ‘word?’ What does that word mean and do when it’s on its own, or when it’s thrown into the completely unexpected context of someone’s Twitter feed?”

In one blog post titled “@everyword in context”, Parrish asks the question, “What would happen if we systematically exposed ourselves to that baggage?” In his eyes, there’s meaning even in a string of aimless words.

“Words are strange,” he says. “I don’t think they even exist, in any meaningful empirical sense: there’s a grand miasma of language out there, spoken and written, and we have ways of compartmentalizing that miasma into chunks that are easy for us to understand and reason about, but which might actually be illusory when it comes down to it.”

Parish wrote on his blog that he plans to write a postmortem on the project and says he hopes to run a “Season 2” for the Twitter bot, starting over from the beginning of the alphabet.

For now, users won’t be bombarded with random words at 30-minute intervals, but the account has come to take on its own form, just like the words it posts vacant of any meaning or context.

“Coleridge said that poetry is ‘the best words, in the best order.’ @everyword is, I guess, just an extreme form of that,” Parrish says.

To the surprise of some of @everyword’s more dedicated followers who tweeted what would happen when the bot finally ceased to produce anymore posts, the account didn’t end with the apocalypse or the earth’s explosion.

@everyword simply ended with one final word: étui, “a small ornamental case for holding needles, cosmetics and other articles.”